Field of the Art
The disclosure relates to the field of business communication, and more particularly to the field of managing call profiles and subscriber personas on, and related behavior of, a telephone control system or private branch exchange.
Discussion of the State of the Art
In business communication, it has been common for a business to operate a telephony private branch exchange (PBX) or other telephony control system to manage call routing and switching for their organization. Recently, services that provide similar and in some cases enhanced features or capabilities and which use different underlying technologies such as hosted or cloud PBX and unified communications platform (UC) which may also be hosted or cloud service, have entered the market and are now in general use as alternatives to traditional PBX Generally, PBX, and hosted or cloud PBX or UC service providers offer a variety of features and capabilities with their product, and an organization selects the subscription service that best suits their needs and configures the specific features they intend to use most. Currently, when a new feature or alternate configuration is needed, someone must manually reconfigure operation to prevent gaps in service—for example, setting a call-forwarding rule to “active” when they leave the office. Additionally, employees are increasingly becoming more mobile, working from a mobile phone instead of a desk phone, which requires more flexible behavior handling to accommodate frequent changes in location or availability. Subscribers using these telephony control systems now have complex features and functions available to them that span, a physical desk phone, a computer based softphone, a tablet based softphone, a mobile phone and a mobile based softphone, all at their disposal, depending on their location and context. The convergence of services onto these devices, whether personally or business owned, means increased complexity and a blurring of subscribers' business and personal time.
What is needed is a system for intelligent telephony system profile control that enables adaptive PBX, hosted or cloud PBX or hosted or cloud UC behavior with existing products, while enabling profile and persona management from a mobile device, thus allowing telephony control systems to adapt to subscribers and to improve their operation without necessarily requiring explicit user intervention.